I was riding east on 96th street (just east of Meridian) when the car in front of me stopped in front of McDonalds to let a westbound car turn against the traffic and go into McDonalds. After the westbound car turned in, the car in front of me just sat there, half in the right lane and half in the middle lane. I was in the middle lane, on a line with that car’s driver. I waited ten seconds for the car to move, and when they didn’t, I started to pull over to the left section of my lane to go around them.

Just as I did this, another car hit me. We’ll call the other car “Bartimaeus”, since he said he didn’t see me. I have a very bright blue and white helmet, an orange Harley “Bar and Shield” logo emblazoned across the back of my rainsuit, and an American flag fluttering on my sissy bar….He would have had to be blind to not see me. See Mark 10:46.

Anyway, Bartimaeus decided that he wasn’t going to wait either, and he moved forward halfway in the middle lane and halfway in the left lane. If I had stayed where I was, he would have just missed me. Since I was moving over into the left portion of my lane, he ran into me with the passenger side of his car. My left highway bar (THANKS DAD!!) took the brunt of the impact both on his car and on the pavement. My left mirror also hit his rear fender on my way down, and it broke off when I hit the pavement. I scuffed up the toe of my left boot, and my left elbow smacked the ground, bruising it. My helmet skidded on the pavement as the bike scraped across the pavement for about five feet or so before coming to a stop.

I stood up, shaken, but not stirred. Wait, that’s not right…shaken but relatively unharmed. Bartimaeus came over to see if I was ok, I said I was fine. I noticed that there was something leaking out of the bike (probably oil or gas), so I picked up the bike so it was upright and rolled it over to the side of the road. We exchanged information and waited for the police to show up. I have not stopped thanking God for keeping me safe and allowing me to continue to live, especially since it’s my 35th birthday.

Now we wait on the insurance companies to figure out whose fault it is. As you can see in the picture, the two scrapes where my bike went down were solidly in my (middle) lane. If he had been in the middle lane, he would have hit me in the back. If he had been in the left lane, he wouldn’t have hit me at all.